Items.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXIII, Issue 7371, 19 November 1898, Page 3

Items.

The Christchurch Press says :Mr A. M'Dougall, one of the outside staft of the railway, left yesterday for Palmerston South, whither he has been transferred. Before his departure he was the recipient of a silver-mounted pipe from his fellow employees. lhe presentation was made by the station master, Mr Pilkington. An emigrant princess of the Royal House of Tahibi has passed away in a foreign land. Titana Marama was in the direct line of succession to the South Pacific throne, but one fateful day fell in love with a Scotchman who had managed to penetrate so far afield. She married him, and discarded the cares of royalty to lead a quiet and uneventful life as wife of a Scotch bailie at Anstruther, where she died lately at the age of fiftyfour. The Tahitlan princess was well known and mnch esteemed by the people of the town and district. It is said that British farmers and dairymen are to-day milking 0ver4,000,000 cows and producing in their dairies about L 32,000,000 worth of milk and butter and cheese. When a Polish Jewess is married It is usual for her hair to be cut off and replaced by a wig, for the purpose, it is said, of lessening her attraction in the eyes of meD other than her husband. One of our most eminent scientists has lately succeeded in taking no fewer than 2000 photographs entirely in darkness. As a rule, six months' cruise decreases the speed of a ship 15 knots in e*ery 100. This is caused by the barnacles which form on a ship's hull. Near Pontefract (or Pomfret), in Yorkshire, lives a banker who has a collection of doors. All of them have come from ancient halls and castles, and all have some other historic value. A collection of ancient weathercocks is also one of this gentleman's possessions. Quite recently he bid the sum of LIOOO in Paris for a door through which passed to death Marie Antoinette, Charlotte Corday, Danton, Robespierre, and others during the French Revolution. One of the doors in his collection shut off from his Roundhead pursuers the unfortunate Charles I; whilst another of them, showing deep indentations made by a battering ram, protected certain celebrated followers of the Pretender after the raid into England of 1745.